A 16c Edicola at Colle Alto di Bovara

As so often elsewhere, if I'd been zooming thru the landscape in a car, I wouldn't really have seen this: just another one of those little things with roofs that dot the Umbrian countryside; and so, while the driver needs intelligence to spot this and stop, as a pedestrian toting that camera bag I needed none at all. (And this is a small road: if you're just rushing down the highway in a hurry to get somewhere else — there's a big one just a mile west of here — all the sensitivity in the world will do you no good. Take a hint . . . .)

The roof, in fact, is the tipoff that this is something to see up close; see for example
this similar example at Montefalco, just five kilometers W of us. The more of a roof we see, the more someone thought it needed protection; eventually some of these wayside shrines acquire more roof, and a door, and before you know it we can even have a chapel. The Italian name for a wayside shrine, edicola, is descriptive: it means little building.

In this case, a well-preserved fresco of the Virgin Mother and Child, flanked by two saints: the books in their hands mark them as either Apostles or Doctors of the Church; and looking closely, we can see that the older man holds a key, and the other a sword — that long vertical bar ending at his feet — which identify them as St. Peter to the Virgin's left and St. Paul to her right. Peter's features, furthermore, are familiar: he is very often depicted this way, as a bald, thick-set man with a well-cropped white beard.

The left and right walls of the edicola, being more exposed to weather, have survived less well. The inner saint on each side can still be identified, though: on the right St. Rocco, protector against the plague, is instantly recognizable since he bares his leg. Often paired with him, St. Sebastian, who can, in fact, just barely be made out on the left, stripped and tied to a pillar. (For a somewhat clearer idea of the iconography, see
the fresco at S. Niccolò in Matigge, about an hour's walk away.) The outer saints seem unidentifiable: possible guesses would be St. John the Baptist on the left, if we read the lower edge of his clothing as the skin of an animal, or St. Nicholas of Myra if the red object is a purse; and, on the right, just maybe, St. Catherine of Siena; all popular saints in the region, but I'm not very convinced myself.

The vault of the niche is painted also, in imitation of precious marbles; and in imitation of a bossed keystone, the Holy Spirit spreads its wings in a fairly standard "glory" of clouds and light. Light of another kind there once was as well: that's an electric cord dangling, the bulbs now removed. This little shrine is in fact a miniature church: a choir with Mary and Jesus, an altar-like table, side chapels with our four saints, the vault of Heaven above it; and like many churches in the area, fissures in the fabric are very likely evidence of seismic activity, very likely the 1997 earthquake that damaged so many churches in this eastern flank of Umbria, less than a month before I took these pictures.

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